


and if you're listening to this (you are the resistance)

by wanderlustlover



Series: Wanderlustlover's Yuletides [16]
Category: Terminator (Comics), Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator - Various Authors
Genre: End of the World, Epistolary, F/M, Flash Forward, Flashbacks, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Movie: Terminator (1984), Movie: Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Movie: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Movie: Terminator Salvation, Multi, Termination: Salvation: From The Ashes, Terminator: Salvation: The Final Battle, Time Skips, Time Travel Fix-It, Yuletide 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28089174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: Later your children will be important, he'd said.I never knew how soon later would become now.Yuletide 2020 Prompt:Kate Brewster & John Connor Scenes
Relationships: John Connor & Kyle Reese (Terminator), John Connor & Marcus Wright, John Connor & Sarah Connor, John Connor & Skynet, John Connor & The Terminator, Kate Brewster/John Connor, Kate Connor/John Connor, Sarah Connor & The Terminator, Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese, Serena Kogan & Skynet
Series: Wanderlustlover's Yuletides [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/190838
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yukito](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yukito/gifts).



_ Your father told me, before I even knew that we were going to be married, the Terminator told him about you.  _ **_Later your children will be important_ ** _ , he said. I never knew how soon ‘later’ would become ‘now.’ Neither of us did.  _

_ And yet, here you are. No bigger than a fingernail, and already everything.  _ _  
_ _  
_ _ A minor miracle. A terrifying promise. An epoc of shifted focus.  _

_ I would give my life for you, for your future, for a world worthy of growing up in, already, without the promise that I will get to see you grow up, or find out what this ‘important’ destiny is that the future has promised to you, protected you for, before you were even here. I have longed for you, and dreaded your coming, and I love everything about you so much already I feel as though I could defy the whole war just to keep you close.  _

* * *

> **2008: SIERRA NEVADA: CRYSTAL PEAK**
> 
> **STATUS:** _ Kate Brewster, Vet Technician _
> 
> The scent of dust and decay is thick in the air, as Kate, still frozen, stares around the derelict room. Computers that must be twenty and thirty years old. Bare and barren walls, and echoing halls, that make it feel even smaller than it is. A stage for the President to speak to the nation from, resplendent in red, white, and blue so pristinely bright it seems to mock them with its extraordinary normality. 
> 
> John is losing it in another room. Something crashes and in the pause Kate sees what she has seen every time her mind paused, unblinking, unable to forget. Blood soaking through her father’s shirt. His lips, pale and trembling. His voice, whispering,  _ Katie _ . Telling his one last and greatest lie that will protect the once people of this now fallen nation.
> 
> The radio’s crackle (dozens of voices, terrified survivors, reaching into the void, beyond the horrors they have now witnessed tearing apart the world) and John is frozen, a deer in the headlights of a mactruck. Though nothing about him is unedged, untrained, unaware. As he steps, faltering toward the decrepit radio system and its equally decrepit mic. Reaching out a finger to touch it.    
>    
>  His one breath to banish all last rebellious denials untaken. 
> 
> There was only sliding into the ever promised being.
> 
> John Connor, the boy, exited the stage
> 
> becoming John Connor, Savior of Humanity. 
> 
> ~*~*~
> 
> It’s hours later when Kate interrupts him again. John is still leaning into the microphone speaking with that confidence she’s starting to realize he doesn’t know he has. One that is probably entirely believable to those listening. The people who can’t see that his shoulders, maybe his whole chest, is caved toward the desk, conveying an exhaustion his voice refuses to admit to.    
>    
>  “I found the bedrooms and the showers and the food. Nothing exciting, but--” It catches in her throat, even as she means well in giving him reasons to come away. He needs sleep. Food. A shower. They both do. Her mouth pauses on that careless ‘but.’ As though they should be judging at all. Millions, maybe billions, the world over, are dead or dying right now. 
> 
> Whoever else is left out there likely will not even have this much.
> 
> The edges of her eyes burn again, but she tries to keep the tears from coming back. 
> 
> When John doesn’t answer any part of her earlier words, only continues to stare manically at 
> 
> the machine he’s relying on to be his receiver, Kate adds a little more forcefully: “You need a break.” 
> 
> “I’m fine. I can’t--” 
> 
> “You can’t help anyone if you collapse either,” Kate contradicts. 
> 
> John finally looked over his shoulder at her fully, but she kept her shoulders squared and her eye contact unwavering the way The General taught her long, long ago. She can see the assessing look he gives her, and that cagey, sharp, resistance of his building. Which she cuts off at the pass adding, again: 
> 
> “I’m not saying you have to stop. Just. You need a break. A shower. Some food. We can take shifts for sleep. One of us in here on the radio, while the other sleeps, at least until we get more of an idea of what it looks like out there. Or people here to help take more shifts.” 
> 
> “That’s not actually a bad idea.” 
> 
> Kate doesn’t have the energy to be insulted by the note of surprise in his voice. Instead of holding on to it (he doesn’t  _ really know her  _ anymore than she knows him from the boy in  _ Kripke’s basement _ ), she held a hand out for him instead. “I have those sometimes. Besides, we’re in this together now, right? Isn’t that what he said?” 
> 
> John looked down at her hand hovering there in the air. Everything about him gone quiet and still save for that threadbare exhaustion that seemed to all but ripple the air around him, considering her hand like it was something far more than the sum of its small parts, before he finally stepped toward her.
> 
> “Together,” John repeated, part question, part desolation, part desperation, and what Kate remembers more than even the feel of his hand wrapping around hers, was the weary sadness under it. The sound of the man using a word he has known, but who had been alone for years since his mother died, and apart for a whole lifetime.    
>    
>  Now shoved through the doorway he had been told of all his life, and yet never wanted to cross the threshold of, and Kate did as she didn’t know she often would in the coming years: she softened it. Knocking her shoulder into his as she pulled him toward the hallway, to find the barracks rooms, quipping:    
>    
>  “But don’t think this means we’re sharing a room. We might be getting near to that whole last people on Earth thing, but a girl’s got to have standards even then.”
> 
> As though her fiance had not died a day ago and her father only hours ago; as though she wasn’t hand-in-hand with her would-be husband and the would-be father of her one-day children. Neither of them laughed, but neither of them let go either. 

* * *

_ Your father is a great man, but the greatest of men are often forged in adversity. It wasn’t always that way, but all of humanity labors under adversity now, your father simply got here long before the rest of us. His life formed him, was formed for him, before he was born, much like yours.  _ _  
_ _  
_ _ A destiny named by the future, before he’d even come about, before his parents had ever met. His parents, your grandparents, only met because of all of this. One from the past, and one from the future, both knowing even less than your father and I when everything was set in motion. Why it was the premier of importance: his birth.  _

_ Your grandmother, Sarah, was supposed to have been tough as nails, forged and ready to stand against the storm, even if it meant standing alone. To hear your father talk of her, she was larger than life. A legend to live up to maybe just as much as the moniker given to him.  _

_ Your grandfather, Kyle, was a man of great devotion. Brave as the days and nights are long, since he was a child. What I remember most of him  _ _~~is~~ _ _ was his ability, under all his ferocity, to be kind. To shoulder the burden of his job without letting it tear the light of belief out of him.  _

_ And your father, your father-- John Connor is a great man, do not doubt that, he is and I believe he always will be. His heart still rends for every life lost under his command or any demand he has to make of what is left of the human race, and I am forever proud of him. But you will know the John Connor few others do.  _

_ The man whose eyes wrinkle when he laughs, and the way it comes up from the base of him, true even when it’s quiet. The utter loyalty that would run into burning buildings to save those almost lost, that is also shown in the time he takes to visit those who have lost with condolences, apologies, promises.  _

_ The soft, private reverence of his affection.  _ _  
_ _  
_ _ The fragile blossomed, impossible light of his hope whenever he talks of you, or places his hand over you inside of me. That scarred and callused hand that holds the cradle of the whole future and turns soft as whispered dream on the same fingertips. You will know a side -- *be* a side of John Connor -- no one in this world has ever seen before. Not even me.  _

* * *

> **2013: CALIFORNIA: UNDISCLOSED**
> 
> **STATUS:** _ Kate Connor; Resistance Leader; Wife _
> 
> _ “Connor! Get in here!”  _ _  
>  _ _  
>  _ _ The older man barked like the crack of a gun, and Kate had snapped to attention like the raise of her father’s voice once had, but she couldn’t bring herself to move an inch.  _
> 
> _ “But I’m not a doctor!” Her eyes still taking in the gore which filled up the gurney barely calling itself a human body. Not while that blown up. Not while bleeding that profusely. Desperate, shameful horror and terror twined together, crowding out even her thundering heart, as she added, “I was a vet tech, and barely even trained in that!” _
> 
> _ “Humans are just larger animals. Same parts. Different places. Do you want this woman to die?”  _
> 
> _ His voice was nails and thunder, like her father, but three decades older and an ocean of dead bodies harder. And. She still couldn’t look away from his hands, so dappled red they looked painted, fingers pushed inside a body where they should never go, were never meant to be.  _ _  
>  _ _  
>  _ _ “Well?! Do you?”  _
> 
> _ “No.”  _
> 
> ~*~*~
> 
> And so, in the year of 2013, five years past Judgement Day, Katherine “Kate” Connor, age 29, wife of (“The”) John Connor, leader of the Resistance, had become a surgeon. Without the years or debt that had once made her choose the easier of two paths, back in another lifetime, in another world. Even more unexpectedly, was that in the dominoes that would tumble forth from that bloody day, she’d finally found her place in the resistance. 
> 
> Never had her faith in the necessity of the resistance, or John, wavered, but John had always known who he was supposed to be, what he was supposed to be doing. Even if amorphous, even if sometimes lauded a savior and sometimes slandered as a false prophet with a god complex, he always had his direction that brooked for no slights and names and other’s aims.
> 
> Kate had only ever had “ _ Your children will be important _ ” and her hand in John Connor’s. 
> 
> She had stood stalwart in her husband’s shadow, companion and sounding board and intimate secret keeper at his side, one of many leaders of the resistance for the last five years. But never once, no matter the number of pre-experienced hallowed halls of her father’s job in her childhood, had Kate felt she truly belonged, been doing anything near her best, in war rooms filled with generals and militiamen. 
> 
> But she knew what she could be doing (maybe ever  _ should _ be doing), when her hand was half in a chest cavity, more terrified she would kill a man failing not to double over and vomit on the scent and texture of so much blood. Kate had nightmares every night for the rest of the week. The blood still on her, crawling up her arms like it was alive, coming to swallow her. 
> 
> On the fifth day, the doctor had called her down to triage again. The corporal, a compound runner and scout, had lived and wanted to thank her. She had a family two states over, and she’d managed to make it here with specs on a new terminator being developed. That night Kate still had the same dream again.
> 
> But the next morning, scared and brave, with nothing more than clean hands and a kiss from John on her temple, she went back to triage, and she told the old grizzled man she was ready to learn.

* * *

_I came back from surgery to your father holding this letter, saying there would be no need for this. That we know that we’ll have many years with you, and your siblings who come after you, before_ _ ~~that fateful day~~_ _~~the last day~~_ _the end._

_ I reminded him that he got nearly twenty years with his mother, and he still listens to the tapes she recorded for him when he was pregnant. That he relies on them for the facts as she knew them then, just as much as the sound of her voice, gravel-amber trapped, such wild-fierce love for him in every word of all her defiance.  _

_ He was quiet a long moment (the serious quiet moment, the one you’ll come to know so well, where even the great John Connor pauses and considers; because the best leaders are the ones who truly listen just as much as act), and then he said only, with even quieter gravity,  _

_ “Say hello for me.”  _

_ Your father says hello. He may write you a letter now. Or make a recording. _

_  
_ _ He is the best man I know, and, while I could wish for a safer, happier world for you to come into, I could wish no better father for you than him. This is just another example of why.  _

_ (Your father says over and over again, what his mother said to him, what your mother says to you now: We have no fate but what we make. Maybe the future is written, but the future can be rewritten, too. Every use of the Time Door has shown it. Every member of our family has proven it.  _

_ Time can be changed. Destiny can be delayed. Humanity can be saved. _

_ If you believe one thing, believe that you have no fate but what you make.)   
  
_

* * *

> **2018: CALIFORNIA: UNDISCLOSED**
> 
> **STATUS:** _ Kate Connor; Resistance Leader; Wife; Surgeon; Mother _
> 
> “Talk to me.” It’s modulated for quiet, if not soft, as Kate slipped her arms through John’s from behind and pressed her cheek to his back. 
> 
> She’d finally found him, three places after starting to look. Not in bed where he should have been recuperating from the heart surgery that had immediately promoted itself to the most terrifying, and most terrifyingly important, surgery Kate had performed in her life. Or in the briefing room or planning room where he’d often inevitably have decided he was needed more than in bed after being injured, and why would heart replacement be any different.
> 
> No, here he was, standing, alone against the barely cracked dawn, before the grave of Marcus Wright. Two slats of wood, a single name, and the long swatch of red cloth that marked his grave with the highest honor. The man who was half machine, and who had saved John Connor from death even after being fully forsaken as the enemy. 
> 
> “He’s so young,” came as a rumble through that back and over his shoulder, even as one of John’s arms crossed over hers and his hand rested on hers. Fingers sliding in, and holding with a fierceness that betokens the need of her here even if his voice, still as the dry California morning air, didn’t. 
> 
> “Kyle?” Kate asked, knowing that even this was too public for calling him the other thing he was. John’s father. 
> 
> The only sound John makes first is just a noncommittal hum she can feel through his chest more than hear. They’ve both known he had to show up sooner or later. She wishes she could easier make herself flush with his back, but she can’t regret the space their first child, still growing, takes up.
> 
> “He’s going to become one of my most trusted generals, and I have to pretend that I don’t even know him.” 
> 
> “You don’t,” Kate contradicted, gently. “Not really.”
> 
> “You know what I mean,” he said, frustratedly.
> 
> Kate moved, finally. Pulling back and tugging on his arm for him to turn. Her expression was sympathetic, without being pitying. “I do know what you mean, but you knew we had to find him sometime soon, and you know that you’ll have a good long time with him still. You get to watch him grow up and become the man who’ll make all those choices.”
> 
> “He won’t ever know,” John said, leaning his forehead against hers. 
> 
> “No, and it’s part of what you’ve always looked up to about him. He’s the one person in all of this who never really knew when they went back or forward what their touching time would do. He’s just going to be that kind of man, and you--” She reached up to lay a hand against his cheek. “--will have a lot to do with him knowing how to be that man.” 

* * *

_ If there was one gift I could grant you, when you come into this world, and make our small two person family suddenly into three, it’s strength. Strength to hope. Strength to believe. That one day freedom will come for us, and all the people of the world. We will triumph. We will be free of the oppression of the machines.  _

_ Your father calls it his duty. To remind people they have these things. To inspire them where the light has gone out, though he would never use those words for it. Desperation only causes atrophy when left in darkness, and in coming together, in hearing each other’s voices, hearing his voice, touching the ever-growing legend, a light, like that of the smallest candles, continues to ripple out.  _

_  
_ _ He ends each of those broadcasts with a simple phrase:  _

_ and if you’re listening to this, you’re in the revolution. _

_ And you are, too. Though you don’t know it yet, and I wish I could keep that from you as long as possible, even when I know how impossible that will be. It’s as true as every word I’ve written in this letter, and every word I’ve whispered to you through each day as you grow.  _

_ But there is hope, and there is faith, and there is strength, and if I cannot promise the peaceful world I grew up in for you to grow up in, I can promise you one where you will always see the indomitable spirit of humanity can never be totally crushed. It strives and it grows and it refuses to do anything but find a way.  _

_ Just like you are. A way forward. A promise of even more light. Of one-day freedom.  _


	2. Epilogue & Outtake

**2030: CALIFORNIA: LOS ANGELES**

**STATUS:** _ Kate Connor; Wife; Surgeon; Mother; Civilian _

The war is over, and like prophesied and promised John Connor is dead. But only by sorts and only by vague, now outdated, human-only definitions. He is something else, but he is not  _ someone _ else. Her husband is still her husband at the heart of what he has become. The hard choices, and even harder sacrifices, that no one but John Connor has been asked to make. 

He is still John Connor. Still the Savior of the Human Race. 

Still the man who brought not victory -- but peace. 

The man who forged the unexpected path. 

The one that saved lives on both sides. 

The ultimate sacrifice of a life. 

Twice. 

“What are you thinking about?”

Kate finds a blush still creeps into her cheeks, smiling unashamed and yet half-ruefully, as though caught daydreaming. “You.” 

“You still haven’t gotten over your girlish notions of being at the second hand of power yet?” He jokes light even in the gruffness of his voice, and it is a marvel that it is so perfectly his voice, but she still sees that few seconds of tension, of rooted doubt, just barely at the edges of his eyes. 

There’s time yet for him to become sure. 

All of the time now. All of the rest of their now-safe lives. 

“My girlish notions--” Kate says, leaning up to wrap her arms around his neck. Warm skin under her hands, and that even warmer smile beginning to mirror hers, bleeding all the way into those ever dark eyes. “--are the only thing that keeps you in house and home. You should be grateful.” 

“Forever,” John says, with a feverish whisper that is nothing like the last few seconds of joking. Placing a kiss on her forehead, and then her lips. Whispering once more, as though it were for time and the universe, itself, instead of just his wife. “Forever.” 

She has only the chance to smile, and lean up to kiss him again once, before suddenly there is a crash followed by the screech of someone too small getting into too much trouble again, from a few rooms away, and Kate laughs, all pleased exasperation, “Duty calls.” 

“Doesn’t it always?” is suddenly that quick quipped response returns.    
  
The benediction of a lifetime’s love unexpected, perhaps never quite believed to be more than undeserved, and yet ever cherished, pulled back into those dark eyes, and turned into the edged complaint of interruption. As though they were back to being decades younger than they are, when things were fresh and new and everything was the most harrowing of distraction from learning each inch of each other’s minds, and bodies. 

“You wouldn’t have it any other way,” Kate said, sliding under his arm. “Let’s go see what your children have ruined this time.” 

**Author's Note:**

> References to _Terminator_ , _Terminator 2: Judgement Day_ , _Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines_ , _Terminator: Prequel to Salvation: Sand in the Gears_ , _Terminator: Salvation_ , _Terminator Salvation: From The Ashes_ , and _Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle Vol. 1 & 2_. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed reviewing, researching, and prepping it up as your Christmas surprise. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
